Scientists Discover How Bacteria Communicate to Resist Antibiotic Treatment

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are becoming a huge issue across the globe. Doctors and medical researchers have to use stronger and stronger doses of antibiotics to combat bacteria that only a few years before would have succumbed to a much weaker dose. Now, scientists have discovered that bacteria utilize a novel means of communication to resist antibiotic treatment.

Learning how bacteria resist antibiotics is crucial for researchers. Without understanding the mechanism, they can't develop ways to prevent it from happening, which means that bacteria that can make people sick could potentially spread and be untreatable by regular means. That's why the scientists focused on how bacteria spread the ability to resist antibiotics in this latest study.

The researchers examined the bacterium, Burkholderia cenocepacia. This environmental bacterium causes devastating infections in patients with cystic fibrosis or with compromised immune systems.  After examining the bacteria, the researchers found that the more antibiotic resistant cells within a bacterial population produce and share small molecules with less resistant cells. This made them more resistant to antibiotic killing.

"These small molecules can be utilized and produced by almost all bacteria with limited exceptions, so we can regard these small molecules as a universal language that can be understood by most bacteria," said Omar El-Halfawy, the first author of the study, in a news release. "The other way that Burkholderia communicates its high level of resistance is by releasing small proteins to mop up and bind to lethal antibiotics, thus reducing their effectiveness."

So what exactly were these small molecules? They're derived from modified amino acids, which are the building blocks used to create proteins. These molecules protected not only the more sensitive cells of B. cenocepacia, but also other bacteria--including a highly prevalent CF pathogen known as Pseudomonsas aeruginosa.

"These findings reveal a new mechanism of antimicrobial resistance based on chemical communication among bacterial cells by small molecules that protect against the effect of antibiotics," said Miguel Valvano, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This paves the way to design novel drugs to block the effect of these chemicals, thus effectively reducing the burden of antimicrobial resistance."

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.